“Wow,” murmured a thrilled Tim. “Damn.” Others murmured similarly.
“Hold on a minute, folks, this doesn’t hold water,” said Gideon, for whom things were veering too close to the occult to be comfortable. “What Cisco says is true enough, generally speaking, but it
doesn’t apply in this case. How could they recognize Arden after so many years? How would they know he’d be aboard the
Phil backed him up. “And how could they know that he’d be standing there in plain sight right at that moment? They couldn’t, it’s impossible.”
John chimed in too. “Yeah, and how would they know exactly where the boat would be passing at that exact time? How would they know to station somebody right there with a spear?”
“Yes,” said Duayne, throwing in his sensible two cents’ worth as well. “How could they possibly know we’d be close enough to shore for a spear to reach the boat? For most of the time, we would have been way out of range.”
“That’s right,” Gideon said. “The only reason we
“Yes, that’s so,” Vargas concurred.
“So whatever the hell it was about,” John said, “it wasn’t because anybody was laying in wait, specifically trying to get Scofield.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cisco said, unimpressed, and coming within a millimeter of burning himself as he scratched one bare leg with the hand that held the cigarette. “I’m not saying they did or they didn’t, but I tell you this: I been here a long time now, and I spent a lot of time in the jungle, and I seen a lot weirder stuff than this. These people—I don’t just mean the Chayacuro, I mean, you know, a lot of the indigenous jungle people—well, our laws of physics, and motion, and even the material world, they don’t apply. We think there’s no way they could know he’d be coming back, but they have ways of knowing things that science doesn’t even begin to understand. Let me ask
you...um...?” With his chin he gestured questioningly at
Gideon.
“Gideon,” Gideon told him.
“Okay, let me ask you, Gideon. You want to know, how could they know you would ask Vargas to bring the boat close at that exact point, right?”
Gideon nodded. “I sure do.”
“But I see the question a different way.
“Nothing
Before the words had left his mouth he was ashamed of himself. Snapping so pompously at a human wreck like Cisco was contemptible. “On the other hand,” he said in a lame attempt at making amends, “of course you’re right: nobody really can say where his ideas come from.”
Cisco’s reaction only made him feel worse. He’d hurt the poor
guy’s feelings. The gaunt, gray-bearded man dropped his eyes and held up his hands in submission. “I’m just saying,” he mumbled around the half-inch, burning butt still in his mouth. “No offense, buddy.”
At that point, one of Vargas’s Indian crew—the cook, obviously, inasmuch as he was carrying a wooden ladle and wearing a gravy-stained apron tied at the waist, an equally grubby white undershirt, and a villainous black bandanna tied around his head—came out of the kitchen with fire in his eyes.
Dinner was getting cold.
TEN
ANOTHER unexpectedly tasty meal was waiting for them on the buffet table: warm potato and carrot salad, white rice, stewed bananas, chicken and vegetables over spaghetti, and beans, with caramelized bread pudding for dessert. As with lunch, there was no wine served, only water. Everyone seemed hungry, going at the food with gusto. And with rice, potatoes, and spaghetti all in the same meal, the carbohydrate-deprived John looked like a man who’d died and gone to heaven.
But conversation was subdued. Some people feared that the trip was over and done, that Arden might call it off and have Vargas turn the boat around. Those who knew Arden best, however—Maggie, Tim, and Mel—were confident that with a night to sleep on it he would see things as they now did; that is, that the spear attack, whatever its cause, could not have had anything to do with him personally. Despite Cisco’s metaphysical mumblings, the evidence against it was
